Rating: 
Summary: Good professional reference book, but not for students.
Review: Already for many years, this is a classic on optics. Almost any subject you can think of is covered in this book, in a fundamental way. That is its strength and its weakness: experienced scientists will find everything they need, but for students it is not a good book because it is far to detailed: they will get lost in all the mathematical details before they grasp the essence of the subject.This problem also exists - to a lesser extent - for professionals who try to use the book to fill in a gap in their knowledge: they too will find themselves asking why they have to read so many (well thought-through) pages before the authors finally make their point. My advice: use other books to study from, and use this book when you are already experienced and need a high-quality reference work. A note for scienctists: please mention section numbers when referring to this book in your own publications.
Rating: 
Summary: A Classic in the Science of Optics
Review: I read this book in the late sixties, when some of my fellow engineers built and tested an acoustic lens for a developmental company. Born & Wolf were well-acquainted with antenna aperture theory, and were among the first to write that the human eye could resolve 5X better than aperture theory would predict. This they credited to involuntary eye movements called flicks and saccades, which when combined with the brain's ability to do signal processing, was able to produce much better resolution than would have been predicted by the diameter of the retinal rods. In many ways the book gives testimony to God's wonderful gift of vision with color, depth, clarity, and order.
Rating:
Summary: Good book
Review: It is just a rare book on physical optics based on Maxwell equations. Rarely a book states the assumptions,the validity of the equations, the principles and how the equations arrived. Certainly, it is a great book for postgraduates and researchers in physical optics not so for undergraduate students who don't want to go through all the mathematics.
Rating:
Summary: the reference.
Review: It is of course the reference for optics, and is very complete
and rigorous. I didn't learn optics from it, I only use it
as a reference and I suppose that is its function.
It feels a bit oldfashioned (for example, I haven't found
speckel applications in the chapter on coherence) but I
suppose that that is due to the fact that it is a classic.
My other, personal, objection is that I hate Gaussian
units, I prefer by far SI units. Even Jackson finally
conceded to switch to SI units, but Wolf clings on this
Gaussian system.
Rating:
Summary: the reference.
Review: It is of course the reference for optics, and is very complete
and rigorous. I didn't learn optics from it, I only use it
as a reference and I suppose that is its function.
It feels a bit oldfashioned (for example, I haven't found
speckel applications in the chapter on coherence) but I
suppose that that is due to the fact that it is a classic.
My other, personal, objection is that I hate Gaussian
units, I prefer by far SI units. Even Jackson finally
conceded to switch to SI units, but Wolf clings on this
Gaussian system.
Rating:
Summary: A true classic in its field
Review: It should be on the shelf of every serious optical engineer or scientist. I find myself referring to it at least monthly. What more needs to be said?
Rating:
Summary: A true classic in its field
Review: It should be on the shelf of every serious optical engineer or scientist. I find myself referring to it at least monthly. What more needs to be said?
Rating:
Summary: excellent to study from
Review: The Born and Wolf Principles of Optics text is, without a doubt, a classic. At first, it was hard for me to get into the text because I could not see a physics test without problems or exercises at the end of every chapter, but I realized, through this book, that there was a better way to study. Now I'm getting more out of all the texts and journals I study by internalizing the information through memorization and so on instead of learning just enough to work the problems. What I learn from Born and Wolf will take me a long way.
Rating:
Summary: excellent to study from
Review: The Born and Wolf Principles of Optics text is, without a doubt, a classic. At first, it was hard for me to get into the text because I could not see a physics test without problems or exercises at the end of every chapter, but I realized, through this book, that there was a better way to study. Now I'm getting more out of all the texts and journals I study by internalizing the information through memorization and so on instead of learning just enough to work the problems. What I learn from Born and Wolf will take me a long way.
Rating:
Summary: A Classic
Review: This book is a classic with all problems associated. Half of the reference quoted have been written before the WWII. Very useful if you like to quote original papers. This book cover most topics of the classical optics but hardy cover modern topics. However, it is hard to read and use a weird notation. Certainly not useful for rapid referencing. Like the bible, use it only when you have serious problem to deal with.
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